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atlanticza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 18, 2008
560
2
Cape Town
"How big is Africa? You can see from this map created by Kai Krause, that Africa is large. If you combine the USA, China, India, Europe and Japan - they all fit into the continent of Africa. The US can fit comfortably no less than three times. The UK can fit into Africa over 120 times. Even those of us who were educated in Africa may be surprised at these statistics. That's because the geography books at school tend to originate from Europe or the US, and show a proportionally skewed perspective of the world."

http://goafrica.about.com/od/africatraveltips/ig/Maps-of-Africa/Map-of-Africa-Showing-True-Size.
 

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svenn

macrumors 6502
Aug 11, 2010
270
0
Isn't this apples and oranges - continent vs countries :confused: Imagine how many times the USA can fit into Asia?!
 

iStudentUK

macrumors 65816
Mar 8, 2009
1,439
4
London
It's also to do with how a map of the world works. Africa is close to the equator, whereas the USA, Europe etc are further way so are 'stretched'. Look at how big greenland looks on a world map, it isn't actually that big, it's just to do with how projecting a sphere onto a 2D surface works.
 
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